I've worked out a way to automatically cross-post to Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal from Google Plus. This allows me to make ONE post to Google Plus, and have it go automatically to almost all of my other social media. You can throw in LinkedIn as well, incidentally; I didn't mention it initially because I don't use it.

The only thing that's left out of the mix is, sadly, Dreamwidth.

Anyway, here's how it's done:

You'll need a Google Plus account.

Set up a Friends+Me account. Their site is at http://www.friendsplus.me/ . The accounts are free.

When you post publicly to Google Plus, include a hashtag in your post. Hashtag t (i.e. #t) reposts it to Twitter, f reposts it to Facebook, l (that is, "L") reposts it to LinkedIn. You can combine them in any order, so #flt would repost to all three.

If your LiveJournal is set up to aggregate and repost your Tweets, all G+ posts which were reposted to Twitter will appear in your daily 12pm Twitter aggregation on LiveJournal.

It's that easy! Once you've set it up, all you have to do is include the proper hashtags in your public G+ posts. There's nothing else to do.The drawbacks:

Your LJ reposts are in the form of Tweets, i.e. a collection of one-liners. However, they each come with a link to the full-length original on G+.

Formatting doesn't carry over.

The LJ reposts are done at 12pm. They are, therefore, not timely.

Dreamwidth can't get the posts at all, as far as I can figure.

There is no way to commingle comments and responses that you receive to the various copies on different social media.

All that said, it's still a huge improvement!

Almost forgot: you could, in fact, re-import your LiveJournal into Dreamwidth, assuming that you have both. However, as far as I can tell there is no way to automate this, so you'd have to actually go and DO it every so often. I'm also not entirely sanguine about re-importing. Dreamwidth says it won't duplicate posts, but it's apparently a big process that Dreamwidth "schedules", so doing it on a daily basis is probably not a good thing for DW.

Just to be clear, once you've set things up the chain of reposting is:

I don't know if anyone else is likely to end up fighting the SweetIM malware infection, but if you do, it's a real bitch. I had to clean it out of my mother-in-law's desktop recently, and it was NOT fun. On the off chance that you have to deal with it some day, here's how I killed it.

First, I installed Malwarebytes and ran scans. I had to run separate scans for every account on the system.

This was a Windows XP system, by the way, and it had some decent antivirus stuff installed. My best guess is that the infection was picked up from a free game site, by the way. Remember, always browse wisely!

Anyway, after I used Malwarebytes to get rid of the infection in all of the accounts, I still had to go into each browser (Firefox and Internet Explorer) and fix them; SweetIM had changed the home page and default search engine in each one. I changed the homepages from the SweetIM homepage, (a sure source of infection), and changed the search engine from the SweetIM search tool, which also comes with free infections.

Even so, I ended up having to completely reset Firefox on her primary account. SweetIM is a hellishly stubborn infection.

And after all that, I happened to notice that there was still a link on the desktop of one of the accounts to something called "search the web". Which, when I checked the properties, turned out to be - you guessed it - another SweetIM infection point.

These people are evil, evil, evil. I'm tempted to call for the death penalty for malware writers.

After that I did some housekeeping, including updating Firefox and installing Chrome, and now the system looks fine. But man, what a nasty piece of malware! Killing it took about two to two-and-a-half hours of my time. If there was justice in this world, I would be able to collect payment for that time out of the hide of the SweetIM people.

just a quick post about voice dictation aundry with and LiveJournal. Shit. I can already see that I'm going to have some big problems. LiveJournal 0 mobile sites really sucks when you try to do voice dictation or 1 time what I do from my samsung Galaxy Nexus. I am NOT making any corrections to this post.

This is interesting semi:3 with or rather Android actually picked up the emphasis are used on the word not above. Anyway, I just a response to a coming over on livejournal, and the interface was awful and wretched. Dream with seems only slightly better. That's unfortunate.

Oh, and since the Russian language seems to be in crocheting on livejournal, I think that I will take this opportunity to say that people earn is a brutal dictator who murders has on people and is strangling democracy in Russia. I would have simply said puting sucks, but under statement is not my style. Crap. I'll come back and edit the word cute in in later. He's not cute!

I haven't been pleased with Barnes & Noble's Nook Color. The book selection is relatively poor, and the prices are relatively high. Which is why I have been utterly delighted by Baen Books.

Not only do they offer a large selection of classic science fiction books for free, but they have a surprising number of books by classic and modern SF and fantasy authors for very reasonable prices. For example, they have quite a few of the Heinlein juveniles - which, I've been told, have often been out of print in recent years - for $5-$6 each. And they're well-formatted, have nice e-covers, and are available in many useful formats (including epub for the Nook and Kindle format too). What's more, they're not restricted by DRM, so you can download them to multiple devices.

I respect the hell out of a company that doesn't treat their customers as potential thieves. And so I've picked up a bunch of books from them for Sebastian, including most of the Heinlein juveniles as well as James H Schmitz's The Witches of Karres - a classic, and one of my favorites. Plus quite a few others! They can even be read online, on a computer, laptop, or tablet.

Most of their books are in the four to six-dollar range. I wish other ebook publishers had as much sense as Baen! But as it is, Baen has already gotten a lot more of my money than Barnes & Noble has. Or will, for that matter.

Skype is in a war of sorts with Google Voice. And today, I discovered that Skype had taken my system hostage as a prisoner in that war.

I used to be able to use my Google Voice account to call any phone in America for free from my Gmail home page; just type in a phone number or the name of a contact and I'd be connected, with a clarity that actually stunned some of the people I spoke to. Apparently Google Voice uses some sort of astonishing new sound-processing algorithm.

And then recently I installed Skype, since several friends had urged me to try it. Today I tried to use Google Voice to call my parents in Massachusetts. I typed "Dad" in the Google Voice box...and instead of his home and mobile numbers appearing, they appeared with Skype icons surrounding them along with a dollar sign. When I hovered over the numbers, I was told I would be making a "low cost call with Skype".

Now, just to be clear: the call should have been free, via Google. Instead Skype blocked my ability to make that free call, and tried to force me to pay them for it. As far as I'm concerned, that's stealing.

I tried to find a way to make the call WITHOUT using Skype. No matter what I did, Skype wouldn't allow me to do that. I shut down Skype; when I went back and tried to call with Google Voice, Skype immediately restarted itself and invited me to pay them if I wanted to make the call.

I began to seriously consider uninstalling Skype. I have a temper, but I don't think anybody would take it well when some company takes over something on your own system and basically holds it hostage. Boiling with rage, I began to research a solution.

It wasn't easy to find, but I found it. The problem was an add-on that had apparently come bundled with Skype. So I had to go to the Windows Control Panel, choose Add/Remove Programs, and then removed the program called "Skype Click to Call". Mind you, I wasn't told that the goddamned thing would be installed when I installed Skype, and I damned well wouldn't have installed it if I'd known that it was replacing my option to make free phone calls with the requirement to pay Skype for those same calls.

But Skype, here's a message for you: I will never spend a penny on any of your services, EVER. I'll use the free stuff because my friends are on it. But otherwise, you can go screw yourselves.

I gave in and bought Motorola Phone Tools today. Had to spend an hour or so on the phone with Motorola support, trying to figure out why it didn't work. Finally I got it fixed up, and was able to download a year or two worth of pictures and videos from my phone.

The videos are of surprisingly poor quality, but the photos are decent. And now I can take as many photos as I want with my cell without worrying about filling it up or paying $$$ to send them to myself via the net.

I gave in and bought Motorola Phone Tools today. Had to spend an hour or so on the phone with Motorola support, trying to figure out why it didn't work. Finally I got it fixed up, and was able to download a year or two worth of pictures and videos from my phone.

The videos are of surprisingly poor quality, but the photos are decent. And now I can take as many photos as I want with my cell without worrying about filling it up or paying $$$ to send them to myself via the net.

Congratulations, LJ, the new posting page has broken the spellcheck feature of the Google Toolbar - and believe me, I miss it already. For one thing, it was a HELL of a lot more convenient to use than the built-in LJ check. And it had a customizable dictionary, with a lot of words I'd added over the last year or so.

In fact, I actually took my last post, opened up a comment box on an entry in my journal, and pasted it there in order to spell-check it. And then I copied the results, closed the comment window without posting, and pasted the comments back into the posting page.

Congratulations, LJ, the new posting page has broken the spellcheck feature of the Google Toolbar - and believe me, I miss it already. For one thing, it was a HELL of a lot more convenient to use than the built-in LJ check. And it had a customizable dictionary, with a lot of words I'd added over the last year or so.

In fact, I actually took my last post, opened up a comment box on an entry in my journal, and pasted it there in order to spell-check it. And then I copied the results, closed the comment window without posting, and pasted the comments back into the posting page.